My week has an unusual road trip coming up–to Wallops Island, Va., where Rocket Lab plans to conduct the first U.S. launch of its Electron rocket Friday evening. This is a much smaller vehicle than the others I’ve been privileged to see lift off, but driving to the Eastern Shore’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport is also a lot simpler than traveling to the Kennedy Space Center.

In addition to the stories below, Patreon readers got to read my first impressions of Mastodon, the federated alternative to Twitter on which you can find me as robpegoraro@journa.host.

11/29/2022: Company That 3D-Prints Houses on Earth Lands Lunar Construction Contract, PCMag

I had read before about Icon Technology’s ventures into 3D printing walls of houses on Earth, so when I got an advance copy of their news about getting a contract to do much the same thing on the Moon, they had my interest.

11/29/2022: Verizon’s response to T-Mobile trash-talking: Just you wait, Light Reading

I interviewed Verizon network exec Brian Mecum while at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii last month, and he had some interesting things to say about 5G features that the carrier is not rushing to deploy.

11/29/2022: Former Twitter Trust and Safety Chief: ‘If Protected Tweets Stop Working, Run’, PCMag

I watched Kara Swisher’s interview of Twitter’s former trust-and-safety chief Yoel Roth, and almost none of it gave me any more confidence in Elon Musk’s ability to right the ship he has bought with $13 billion loaned from banks that presumably want to get it back.

12/1/2022: 1Password Can Now Save Your ‘Sign in With’ Logins, PCMag

This new feature at the password manager I use (courtesy of this Toronto firm providing free service for journalists) addresses a real issue I deal with. As in, I’ve opened a few accounts on my iPad using the “Sign in with Apple” option there, then can’t quickly access them on my Android phone or Windows laptop because it would require signing into the Apple account that I don’t use on those devices and jumping through Apple’s two-factor authentication checks.

12/2/2022: What to know before you open your Comcast TV or internet bill: Rates are going up (again), USA Today

TV Answer Man writer Phillip Swann tipped me off to the TV fee increases with a Nov. 26 post, and then Comcast PR let me know about the broadband rate increase.

12/2/2022: Google Messages Gets End-to-End Encryption for Group Chats on Android, PCMag

This would have been a quick writeup of some Google news shared in advance, but ensuring that readers would get a clear look at the tangled backstory of Google’s attempt to upgrade messaging from SMS–and get Apple to play along–always eats up some words.